Born in Philadelphia on January 1, 1752, Elizabeth Griscom was brought up a Quaker and educated in Quaker schools. On her marriage to John Ross, an Episcopalian, in November 1773, she was disowned by the Society of Friends. After his death in January 1776 she took over the upholstering business he had founded. Her late husband╒s uncle, George Ross, was a noted patriot and a friend of George Washington, and according to the traditional account, Washington, George Ross, and Robert Morris came to Mrs. Ross╒s house in June 1776 and asked her to make a flag for the new country that was on the verge of declaring its independence. She suggested a design to Washington, he made a rough pencil sketch on the basis of it, and she thereupon made the famous flag in her back parlor. She is supposed also to have suggested the use of the five- rather than the six-pointed star chosen by Washington. (Whatever the source of the design, the stars-and-stripes flag was adopted by the Continental Congress in June 1777.)
There is no written contemporary record of the story, which was first publicly told in a paper before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1870 and published in Harper╒s Monthly in 1873, but there is no conflicting testimony or evidence, either, and the story is now indelibly a part of American legend. Betsy Ross married Joseph Ashburn in 1777, and, after his death in a British prison in 1782, she was married for a third time in 1783 to John Claypoole. She continued the upholstering business, which became very profitable, until 1827, when she turned it over to her daughter. She died in Philadelphia on January 30, 1836. The house where she is supposed to have made the flag was marked in 1887.
